Mitchell: Ira Defiance Threatens Ulster Peace

BELFAST — The Irish Republican Army and other outlawed groups must disarm as part of Northern Ireland's peace accord, the former U.S. senator who led negotiations said Sunday.

George Mitchell said the issue threatens to unravel the agreement. But he maintained that the accord achieved last April on Good Friday had been kept deliberately vague on this and other points.

"The agreement represented the most that could be achieved at that time," Mitchell told British Broadcasting Corp. television.

He said that if the accord had been "more precise in any one of literally dozens of respects," either of the two key parties--the IRA's allies in Sinn Fein or the Ulster Unionists, who represent much of Northern Ireland's British Protestant majority--would have rejected it.

The cornerstone of the agreement, a Protestant-Catholic government for Northern Ireland, has been delayed for months and is supposed to be formed by Good Friday, which is this week.

Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble, elected to lead the government, says Sinn Fein cannot take part unless the IRA starts to disarm beforehand, a condition only hinted at in the agreement, which specifies that the IRA should complete disarming by May 2000.

"Real progress means actually commencing the process of disarming," Trimble said in the interview on BBC television. "If it (the Republican movement) remains intransigent, then there is going to be a problem, and we will find, in effect, the process will go into crisis."

Sinn Fein says it must receive two positions in a 12-member government regardless of the IRA's apparent determination to retain its weapons.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern were to fly to Belfast on Monday to attempt to reconcile the Ulster Unionist and Sinn Fein-IRA readings of the agreement.

Mitchell--who in April 1998 directed negotiations alongside Ahern and Blair--played down the suggestion that he should return too.

"If there was some way that it was absolutely essential that I could play some role, obviously I would never say no," he said.

Although he didn't know when the IRA and other outlawed groups would start disarming, Mitchell said, "it must occur. That's an essential element in this agreement."

Several pro-British paramilitary groups also are supposed to disarm by May 2000, and only one has begun to do so. Their politicians receive too few votes to gain any government posts.